PEN World Voices Report: The Art of Failure

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Late Thursday night, after several PEN events and many drinks, a European friend and I succumbed to the temptation to make sweeping generalizations about the state of literature in America and abroad. Most of our aperçus wouldn’t withstand scrutiny in the sober light of morning, but I liked his epiphanic declaration that one of the worst things a piece of writing can be is “harmless.” By that standard alone, the work of the Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard (1931 – 1989) is high art. As Horacio Castellanos Moya put it at “The Art of Failure,” an evening panel on Bernhard at the Austrian Cultural Forum, “Bernhard is a snake. He has rattles. He has poison.”

Castellanos Moya knows whereof he speaks. He is the author of Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador, as well as the recently translated Senselessness, which adapts Bernhard’s long, rhythmic sentences into a Spanish-language idiom. The other “Art of Failure” panelists – scholar Fatima Naqvi, LIVE from the NYPL impresario Paul Holdengräber, and novelist Dale Peck, – had their own insights into Bernhard’s misanthropy. Naqvi has made a career out of studying it, Holdengräber is the scion of a Viennese family forced into exile during World War II, and Peck has raised hackles with his poison-pen reviews of fellow writers.

It was odd, then, that “The Art of Failure” started off on a lethargic note. Moderator Jonathan Taylor, author of a recent Bernhard article in The Believer, was a soft-spoken, even phlegmatic host, and the panel’s format – in which each guest spoke for ten to fifteen minutes before conversation began – seemed ill-suited to its subject. Both Naqvi and Peck seemed to have over-rehearsed their opening remarks. And though Castellanos Moya – “This guy is writing because he doesn’t want to go out killing people!” – added some verve to the proceedings, Holdengräber concluded the first part of the discussion with an apt question: What would Bernhard think of us?

Not much, apparently. Bernhard, according to Naqvi, was a strident opponent of bourgeois cultural institutions like PEN World Voices and the Austrian Cultural Forum. He looked contemptuously on all forms of dilettantism and groupthink. Indeed, part of what Bernhard meant with his frequent invocation of the word “failure” and its synonyms was the condition of dilettantism. Like his countryman Wittgenstein, (whose nephew appears in one of Bernhard’s novels), he held himself to standards few writers are capable of observing.

If the Bernhard panel failed to achieve rigor or purity, though, it did, in its second half, grow into something more involving. As monologues gave way to actual discussion, the panelists began to explore Holdengräber’s proposition that “there is something hygenic in [Bernhard’s] misanthropy.” Postwar Austrians, according to Naqvi, worked so hard to efface the strain of National Socialism in the culture that they often risked harmlessness. In novels such as The Loser and Correction, Bernhard made a place in postwar Austrian literature for a modernist aesthetics of opposition.

Dale Peck, whose critical writings I find both embarrassingly self-involved and hostile to the seductions of literature, proved to be surprisingly eloquent on Bernhard’s aesthetics. He spoke of the importance of “[giving] yourself over” to Bernhard’s totalizing sensibility and the anxiety it produces. And perhaps Bernhard didn’t always live as he wrote; Taylor offered evidence that Bernhard listened to Prince.

Ultimately, questions about the merits of Bernhard’s Weltanschauung remained unresolved. Those panelists who have flirted professionally with dilettantism seemed almost intimidated by Bernhard. And perhaps the novelist’s shade was hovering above us, watching in disgust. Still, in an age when literature too often flirts with harmlessness, the value of a room packed with Bernhard enthusiasts (and neophytes like myself) seemed beyond dispute.

Sheila Heti took the stage last, and told us that she would be dirty. And how. Reading from her new book about a divorced feminist playwright, Heti selected what can only be the dirtiest bits, an extended sex party between the protagonist and an artist named Israel.

A whirlwind weekend in steamy NYC has drawn to a close. Somehow this year I managed to spend even less time than last year on the BEA floor, but as usual the real action was elsewhere. For example, Thursday night’s LBC party was quite an affair. Garth and Noah were along for the ride, and, with our superior numbers we were able to meet and chat up quite a few folks. It was good to see Mark, Sarah, Ed, Bud, Dan, Anne, the folks from LitMinds, Carolyn (who took pictures), Jessica, Megan, Levi, James Marcus, and likely several other bloggers who I’m forgetting. We also met the NYer’sJames Surowiecki, and someone pointed Colson Whitehead out to me.Garth and I dragged ourselves out to BEA Friday morning. After some drama in the press office (“What do you mean I’m not registered!?”), I got to meet Garth’s publisher for his forthcoming book. We also hit the booths for a number of our favorite indie houses. Some of the bigger publishers had free books on hand, but mostly their booths were like crowded movie theater lobbies: plush carpet on the floor and flashy posters on the walls. We also hit the NBCC’s “Ethics in Book Reviewing” panel, about which more in a future post.After lunch with several of the bloggers, Garth and I couldn’t bring ourselves to return to the convention, and we never would. However, after an afternoon spent recharging, we were ready to hit the party in Brooklyn being thrown by A Public Space, Soft Skull, and others. The music was loud and the bar was open. Garth introduced me to a number of his colleagues on the Brooklyn literary scene, and I also ran into an old friend from my Book Soup days. When the beer ran out, a band of us headed over to a party (secret password “boiled peanuts”) being thrown by cookbook luminaries, Matt and Ted Lee. There we noshed on the aforementioned peanuts, spotted Colson Whitehead again, and had a few more gratis beverages. After this, we hightailed it over to the Village to watch the multi-talented Noah play in his band, which is headed up by old friend Colin Steel.Garth and I ended the night in the wee hours with a long walk back over the Brooklyn Bridge. Waking up late on Saturday morning, little thought was given to returning to the convention, and I spent the rest of the weekend recuperating and relaxing.A quick observation: whereas last year blogs were new and strange, this time around they seemed to have fully accepted and assimilated into the publishing behemoth. Nobody that I met at the convention or the parties batted an eye at the bloggers.

All over Book Expo America, the country’s largest book industry trade show, were signs of the major trends in publishing and bookselling. Environmentalism was the order of the day, and everywhere I went there were signs of the industry “going green.” At the American Booksellers Association’s annual Day of Education, Ed Begley Jr. gave the keynote address on how he’s shaped his and his family’s life around notions of conservation, and how independent businesses, particularly indie bookstores, carry on the rich tradition of independent thinking in America. Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now, followed this with a luncheon address that stressed the independent bookselling community’s importance as a bastion of intellectual and political freedom. This set the stage nicely for ABA’s major new initiative.Hours later, the ABA made the long-awaited announcement that Book Sense is no more. It has been replaced by IndieBound, a hipper, younger brand that will attempt to involve independent businesses of every ilk – from independent bookstores to independent dry cleaners to… well, you get the point. I think most everyone would agree that Book Sense had served its purpose and needed reinvigoration. Whereas Book Sense hoped to present a unified front of indies in the face of competition from Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon, IndieBound represents an effort to return to the idea of the neighborhood bookstore and the importance of shopping locally. While the initiative definitely has its share of skeptics (I don’t particularly see how it will help bookstores compete in the online marketplace), it is an infinitely better brand than Book Sense. If the locavore movement can gain traction, maybe this can, as well.Having BEA in LA was something of a mixed blessing. While it was nice to sleep in my own bed at the end of the night, the stress of everyday life added to the stress of being in 24/7 mingle mode can be a bit much. I did my best to partake of the many parties around town, but eventually I ran out of gas. Edan made it to the Skylight Bookstore party, where she ran into Pinky, some cool people from McNally Robinson in NYC (including Jessica from the Written Nerd), Kelly Link and the folks from Small Beer Press. While she was mixing it up there, I went to the Disney Books dinner at Patina. The guest list included some of the major authors in children’s and young adult books today: Eoin Colfer, Jonathan Stroud, Kevin Carroll, Ann M. Martin and Brian Selznick, Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith, Dave Berry and Ridley Pearson, Rick Riordan, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. At first, I was profoundly uncomfortable, as I seemed to be the only person in the room who didn’t have strong opinions on every kids’ book published in the last five years, but after a while (and, let’s face it, a few drinks) I felt more and more at ease. You might think a kids’ book dinner thrown by Disney would be tame. You would be wrong. I didn’t go to every dinner at BEA, but I feel safe in saying this was among the raunchiest. Robert Kennedy told a joke about sexual congress between a leprechaun and a penguin. ‘Nuff said. I laughed throughout dinner and learned a pretty good amount about the authors as well. The evening ended with me convincing a group of booksellers that it would be a good idea to forgo a cab and take the metro to their hotel. The metro only runs until midnight here in LA, and I was warned several times that if we missed the train and ended up stranded in scenic downtown LA, then I would have sold my last book, so to speak. Thankfully for me, we caught the last train out of downtown and everybody lived to see the trade show the next day.The BEA trade show floor, like most large conferences, can be overwhelming without a plan. Mine was fairly simple – spend Friday in panels and meetings, visiting a couple of priority booths in my spare time, then use Saturday (and Sunday, if absolutely necessary) to see the rest of the show. After attending a meeting on the future of the IndieBound webstore, I ducked in to hear Thomas Friedman’s keynote address. He read from his forthcoming book Hot, Flat, and Crowded. While I waited for him to take the stage, I chatted with my neighbor about a Thursday panel I had missed about the future of the e-book. She told me I hadn’t missed much, but that Adobe, Palm, Microsoft, and the others had finally agreed on a single format, making it much easier to compete with the Amazon. Friedman’s address focused again on environmentalism and America’s need to lead the way to finding clean, sustainable sources of energy.After a day of meetings, planned or otherwise (I ran into Nam Le and did a bit of catching up) and a couple of cocktail parties (drinks with Alec Baldwin in support of his book about divorce (Stephen Baldwin was there!), followed by the Ecco Press/Book Soup party at Palihouse, where I drank a sickly sweet champaign cocktail), I was back at BEA early Saturday morning to hit the booths. I put in appearance at McSweeney’s, which was easily the least conspicuous booth there. Just Eli Horowitz and Andrew Leland sitting behind a card table. I made the rounds of the major publishers, guided for a brief bit by Mark Sarvas, who happened to be walking the floor with Jim Ruland of Vermin on the Mount. We hit the Grey Wolf Press booth, where I picked up a copy of a new story collection by Jeffrey Renard Allen called Holding Pattern.Rather than laboriously describe each booth and every galley I got (I got too many), I’ll just touch on the highlights. It seemed I had something nice to say about every book that Da Capo brought with them – I had positively reviewed Des Wilson’sGhosts at the Table for Publishers Weekly, I had been a long-time vocal advocate of Toby Young’sHow to Lose Friends and Alienate People, and I’ve been dying to read David Browne’s biography of Sonic Youth, Goodbye 20th Century, of which I snagged a copy. I had a great time talking to Gavin and Jedediah at Small Beer Press, and walked away with a copy of John Kessel’sThe Baum Plan for Financial Independence. Early on Thursday morning, I’d run into Amy and Janet, two women from Athens, GA who are opening a bookstore there called Avid. They introduced me to Eric and Eliza Jane from Two Dollar Radio, a really cool small press publishing bold, innovative fiction by Rudolph Wurlitzer, Amy Koppelman, and others. I did my usual bit of groveling at the feet of the New York Review of Books, where I thanked them for introducing me to J.F. Powers. They were sweethearts and gave me a pin. At the Tin House booth, I talked up Jim Krusoe’s upcoming event at Vroman’s, which resulted in me snagging a couple of books, including Krusoe’s new Girl Factory and a novel by Adam Braver called November 22, 1963. And finally, as the day wore on and my feet swelled to twice their original size, I spotted somebody in the FSG booth pulling ARCs of Robert Bolano’s2666 out of a box. I grabbed one. It’s 912 pages long, weighs several pounds, and looks better than 90% of the paperbacks published this year. On Saturday night, I slept.For a complete rundown of BEA from the bookseller’s perspective, check out the Vroman’s Bookstore blog.

Moore has the distinct quality of seeming silent even when she is speaking. Her low, honeyed voice moves in jovial swoops, and when she laughs, she does so deeply, like she means it. We sit tucked away in a corner of Brassiere V, on Madison’s trendy Monroe Street, Moore sipping on beer and coffee like she has a hundred times before for a hundred other journalists and I imagining an invisible web spreading out from her, potential narratives vibrating on the periphery.

“That’s too deep for a tattoo,” Moore teases. Turning back to me, she says, “There was a girl who used to bartend here with a tattoo I borrowed for a character. It was a city on her neck and I had a character who had all the cities that she didn’t want to go back to as tattoos.” KC, a young but tired indie musician, is tattooed with “Decatur,” “Moline,” and “Swanee” and befriends, at her apathetic boyfriend’s suggestion (and with questionable motives) an aging and maybe-horny man.

The story in which KC appears, “Wings,” was published in Harper’s and is in Moore’s new collection, Bark. “Wings” is both a summation and forgiveness of the gross things we do, like dating schmucky people and schmoozing the nice-but-wealthy old man next door, things meant to help us get ahead but that instead leave us a little behind. “Ignorance ironically arranged for future self-knowledge,” thinks KC, “Life is never perfect.”

Taking in the room, Moore explains that her writing usually starts with characters and predicaments, “people who are up against the world in a particular manner. Feelings you are trying to get at with language.”

Thirty-seven years have passed since Moore’s first published work appeared, a short story about a janitor in an elementary school, which won Seventeen magazine’s fiction contest in 1976. She was 19 years old and refers to the experience as a “fluke,” noting that she didn’t get serious about writing until many years later. Originally, she had hoped to win Seventeen’s art contest but says that by time she wrested up the courage to send them anything at all, she was writing stories. “What I remember most is the 500 dollars,” she recalls. “Which seemed a fortune to me, and I was able to buy my textbooks plus a new stereo.” Her next published work would not appear until 10 years later, the barbed and reflexive Self-Help, a book that hooks you with all the tough, but good-natured love readers go back for again and again.

Born in Glens Falls, a small town in upstate New York, Moore attended Saint Lawrence University where she studied English, graduating summa cum laude. Her father was educated as a scientist and worked in insurance, though his true love was music, while her mother was a nurse, a teacher and homemaker, and a “community activist of sorts.” The household was fairly religious; dinners began with grace and there was minimal TV watching, a home replete with all the “general suspicions of the 20th century” Moore said last October in a talk, “Watching Television.” Like many of her generation, her and her brother’s salad days were full of illicit television viewing in the basement TV room and mad dashes back upstairs as their parents pulled into the driveway. Their mother would sometimes press her hand against the TV screen to see if it was warm, the vestiges of “Gilligan’s Island” and “F-Troop” evaporating off the glass.

Moore says her parents weren’t supportive or unsupportive of her writing career. “No parent in their right mind should really encourage a child to become a writer. It has to come completely from the child,” she explains. Besides the relative poverty most writers at some point find themselves in, the writing life also tends to be an isolated one, with observational skills sharpening at a quicker pace than social ones. I ask her whether or not she feels her capacity to observe ever gets in the way of simply interacting with people. “I think with all observers it’s a problem,” she remarks, and refers to one of her favorite writers, Alice Munro. “I can’t remember precisely what she said,” Moore says of Munro’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, “But I think essentially it was ‘I just want to be normal now.’” It’s the old idea that to be a writer is to lead a double life. “You’re not doing quite what other people are doing in the same situation perhaps,” Moore reflects.

Part of what defines Moore’s public persona is the debate over how autobiographical the work is, as well as the fervid enthusiasm of her fans. Set in that comfortably crummy place we call middle class, Middle America, her protagonists are often witty, stubborn, and charmingly self-deprecating, a humor mostly lost on the mollifying Midwesterners that surround them. It’s an embarrassing show of intelligence that leaves them feeling more isolated and misunderstood than before. Moore invokes with eerie familiarity awkward moments that tend not to pan out so well — if at all — in a landscape distinctly red, white, and blue. Her hometowns are dead-on, though they have caught her some flack from a few of her Midwestern neighbors. “She made it clear in many interviews how little she thought of the city and its people,” an anonymous reader writes on Madison’s local The Daily Page. “This disdain also showed up in her fiction.”

Home of the University of Wisconsin Badgers and the fiercely granola, Madison is somewhat of an anomaly: a university-town hailed for its liberalism and farmers’ markets in a largely conservative state. The summers in Madison are buggy and bird-chirpy, full of Friday night fish fries and beer-drinking Lutherans. The winters are insanely cold, with hoar frost and black ice and gobs of snow. Cars remain salt-encrusted until mid-March, when temperatures rise high enough to wash them without the doors freezing shut. Wisconsin, like the rest of the Midwest, is dull and cozy and more appealing when filtered through fiction or Instagram.

Some locals took umbrage with Moore’s story that appeared in 1997, in The New Yorker. “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” is a tale in which a baby is diagnosed with cancer and undergoes an operation with some procedural errors. Moore has a son of college-age who was also very ill as a baby and Moore, speaking to the Guardian, explains that the story was assumed by some to be attack on the local hospital. “They felt that I was hard on the medical students, and hard on the doctors.”

From the opening paragraph, it is hard to divorce the fiction from its foundation in reality.
The Surgeon says the Baby has a Wilms’ tumor. The Mother, a writer and teacher, asks, “Is that apostrophe ‘s’ or ‘s’ apostrophe?” The doctor says the Baby will have a radical nephrectomy and then chemotherapy. The Mother begins to cry: “Life has been taken and broken, quickly, like a stick.” She thinks perhaps she is being punished for her errors as a mother. At home, she leaves a message for the Husband. The Baby has a new habit of waving goodbye to everything, which breaks her heart. She sings him to sleep and says, “If you go, we are going with you.” The Husband comes home and cries. He tells the Mother, “Take notes. We are going to need the money.” He says, “I can’t believe this is happening to our little boy,” and cries again. The Mother tries to bargain for the Baby’s life, imagining the higher power she addresses as the Manager at Marshall Field’s. She argues with her husband over the idea of selling the story: “This is a nightmare of narrative slop.”
Others closer to Moore have also questioned whether or not they’ve made it into her work. “People get confused. People get paranoid,” she says, telling the story of a man she once dated who became suspicious of a specific character. “First of all, the character is a woman,” she remembers saying to him, “Second of all, darling, the character has a job.”

She ruffles slightly when asked directly how autobiographical the work is, and is careful to describe writing like stagecraft. “I’m never writing about myself. It’s [about] observing a feeling in someone else. Imagining a feeling in a particular character — and that character is a collage from your mind — and then you enter into that character like an actor or actress. You’re not going to be journaling. You’re trying to find, as efficiently as possible, a thing that person would say — or possibly say — and definitely do, that you, the author, are interested in the reader feeling. All of that happens at your desk.”

Moore does not journal at all, but she does keep a notebook. “One should always take notes and try not to be lazy about it,” she says. And to that end, one is reminded of Joan Didion, who failed at keeping a diary, instead finding comfort in the distinction of note taking. “The point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking,” Didion writes in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook.” “That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.” Similarly, Moore’s work is brimming with a brilliant discernment of what may be interesting to express through prose as opposed to what is overly expressive, a literary refining process Didion describes as “just this side of self-effacing.”

“People Like That” is one of Moore’s best-loved short stories, and to say it is simply memoir perhaps diminishes her ability to pull back and allow the reader some breathing room, a little space for Moore’s audience to enter into her characters and share their pain and the evolution of their love.

Moore is no memoirist, but it is not impossible to connect a few dots between her world and that of her characters, especially when sitting in her web. A small sympathy went out to our waiter when he described the quinoa salad as a “mélange.”

“That’s a terrible word to use for food,” Moore teased. The boy blushed and fumbled for a better description. In her novel, A Gate at the Stairs, protagonist Tassie Keltjin marvels at the evolution of menu-language. “I went back to studying the menu — was it not a kind of poetry?” narrates Tassie. “There were astonishing things: crab mousseline with a shellfish cappuccino. There were fennel-cured salmon noisettes with a champagne foam. Not a Chubby Mary in the house. There was bison carpaccio with wilted spring leaves…There were salads of lambs quarters and mint and sorrel with beets and pea shoots and tomatoes that were heirloom, like brooches, and cheeses that had won prizes in shows, like dogs.”

Obvious correlations like tattoos and menus, or the doll hospital near Moore’s hometown and the one that appears in “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?” are peppered throughout her prose, making it especially hard for people — fans, relatives, friends, and boyfriends — to not become paranoid. “But that’s what artists do,” Moore says, explaining that if she does borrow something like a tattoo, she asks. “And ultimately, elements of a story collide and create a certain feeling,” she says. “You are trying to give the reader an experience.” And with Moore, it’s an experience that occasionally makes the reader want to bash their head in.

“I remember reading a story of hers about a woman who drops a baby,” says Jad Abumrad, host of the popular radio show Radiolab, “and I was devastated.” The last in her collection of short stories, Birds of America, published in 1998, “Terrific Mother” opens with a young woman, Adrienne, awkward and discomfited by the idea of motherhood. At a backyard party, Adrienne is asked to hold a friend’s baby and in an unfortunate moment of picnic benches and gravity, drops and kills the child. It’s a dazzling and trenchant look at one woman’s struggle to somehow continue a life after a god-awful event; about how heavy past events can weigh in the present. “She goes right for the jugular,” says Abumrad.

Her newest collection, Bark, is perhaps her darkest yet and took her over ten years to compose. “One wants a story to be searing and to be whole in terms of what it’s taking in of the world and of life,” she writes later in an email, recognizing the punch she can pack. She suggests that the stories can stand alone, that they should perhaps be read that way. “I think as with all story collections the reader must pace herself, since certainly the writer did.”

Our waiter returns with a small pot of coffee and instructs Moore to “wait three minutes” before pouring. Turning his attention to the newly arrived couple seated next to us he recites the specials, this time without using the word “mélange.”

2.
Like many writers, Moore’s life is not innately interesting, and could be a stand in for most artistic types whose repertoire includes graduating with a liberal arts degree and moving to New York City. “I used to be skinny and young in New York,” she says laughing. Moore worked briefly as a paralegal in the city but the allure of a MFA program, especially one that would pay your tuition, proved magnetic enough to draw her away from city life. “It’s a lonely business, writing. To be around other writers — for them to read your work — it sounded like a dream come true. [And] it kind of was.” She wasn’t keen on leaving New York City but Cornell offered her the best deal. “’My god!’ I thought, ‘I’ll never see another bagel again!’ But of course the main street of Ithaca is all bagel shops.”

Shortly thereafter Moore left for a job at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she taught for over 30 years, only this January relocating to Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Her more recent emails are flavored slightly with southern vernacular, trying on colloquialisms like “darlin’” for size.

What is remarkable about Moore’s prose is how true it feels, her gift in pointing out the “general absurdities of being human,” as Brooke Watkins, a librarian at the New York Public Library wrote to me. I met Watkins at “Watching Television,” part of the NYPL’s annual Robert B. Silvers lectures. Her readings are a veritable bonding experience, excited conversations of “first times” with Moore’s work edge into something akin to sexual frenzy. A young man behind the merchandise table selling Moore’s work raved with abandon about “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?” — his personal favorite — while the woman behind me avidly agreed, saying the book “enters into your bloodstream.” The two hit it off so well I felt like the third-wheel, and slouched off with my then still unread copy. (It is now also my personal favorite. Followed closely by Birds.)

Her fans have been described by the New York Times as “ardent, even cultish.” And like the equally ardent and cultish readers of Joan Didion or David Foster Wallace, writers also distinctive and evocative and deadly funny or deadly sad, we the willfully misunderstood finally feel understood, and we crave her writing, almost narcissistically so. Because we each feel like she “gets us,” we also feel — covetously and alone — that we “get her.”

It is her heroines, specifically, that cull strong, sororal ties. “I’ve met lots of men who love and admire her fiction,” writes Watkins, “but I think it’s her female readership that has more of an obsessive relationship to her work.” Moore, the writer of anxious women with rogue emotions — women unsure of what scares them most, domestic failure or domestic success — has been collectively appointed mother to a thousand disoriented daughters. “Her characters aspire toward a life of the mind,” Watkins writes. “They crave some kind of hard-won wisdom but often slip into self-deprecation and cynicism instead, which ends up being really funny.” With honed bullshit detectors and an over-developed sense of humor, Moore’s characters exemplify a “way to be resilient even when they’re sinking fast. I’ve always found her writing obliquely instructive in this way.”

Moore is no minor authority on human understanding and her language is quick, the kind of language that asks us who you are and what you want to be, reminding us that higher understanding always prevails at our own expense and that happiness can be hard work. In “How to Become a Writer Or, Have You Earned This Cliché?” Moore writes, “First, try to be something, anything else.” And then, later, “You spend too much time slouched and demoralized. Your boyfriend suggests bicycling. Your roommate suggests a new boyfriend.” And later yet:
Vacuum. Chew cough drops. Keep a folder full of fragments.

An eyelid darkening sideways.

World as conspiracy.

Possible plot? A woman gets on a bus.

Suppose you threw a love affair and nobody came.
The essay is Watkin’s personal favorite. “I’d never read anything like it,” she says. “In the end, of course, the story is a cautionary tale about a woman who sacrifices everything for the time to write, and eventually she’s left with no ideas or inspiration, or really any friends, and when I was eighteen I thought this was both sad and hilarious, and the truest thing I’d ever read.”

Exploring the demands of a life is the heart of Moore’s work, and the resonate truth of her prose has fueled a fevered desire for her books. Her characters don’t so much adventure through life as they do drift and stumble through it, making it a map of emotional landmarks, places you keep finding yourself in. One suspects that Moore is not simply writing a life, but cleverly recording yours. There is a commonality linking reader with character, an elastic boundary between her fiction and our reality that both reinforces and subverts one’s own sense of uniqueness. Coming away from one of her stories, one is reminded that we are all just doing this the best we know how.

1.
During a recent visit to Cologne, I avoided the city’s most magnetic tourist attraction – you’ve seen one Gothic cathedral, you’ve seen them all – and instead I explored the city’s bookshops. Large and small, general and specialized, spacious and cramped, there seemed to be no end to the variety. But they all had one thing in common: they were thriving.

How do the Germans do it? When a huge, once-mighty book-selling chain like Borders is going down in flames across the Atlantic, how do the Germans manage to keep their book publishing industry so diverse, so robust, so stable? How do booksellers consistently turn a profit on everything from Goethe to Grass to Grisham? Is it because of careful planning? Dumb luck? Some mystical Teutonic gene? Or could it be a Kultur thing?

2.
Buchladen, a small shop on the north side of Cologne, is as good a place as any to begin searching for answers. It doesn’t look like much from the street – green awning, small display window – but as soon as you enter the shop you’re stunned by the quality and quantity, the variety and beauty of what’s on the shelves. At the front of the shop are new fiction and history books, in hardcover and paperback, by well-known German authors and numerous Americans in translation, including Philip Roth, Richard Price, Nicole Krauss, Paul Auster, and Richard Powers. In the paperback fiction section, 30 feet of floor-to-ceiling shelves, I found books by David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer, Karin Slaughter, Don Winslow, and Elmore Leonard mixed in with German, French, Scottish, Irish, English, and Japanese authors. German readers have catholic tastes. They consume crime novels as hungrily as literary fiction, history, philosophy, erotica, and just about everything else.

One thing you will not find on the shelves at German bookshops, large or small, is that mainstay of big American bookstores – signs announcing steep discounts on current bestsellers. That’s because the cost of all new books in Germany is strictly regulated by something called the Buchpreisbindung, a uniform pricing policy that was adopted voluntarily by booksellers in 1888 and became national law in 2002. By forcing all stores and on-line vendors to sell new titles at the same price, the law is, obviously, a boon to small stores that can’t compete with the volume purchasing of the big chains and online giants like Amazon.de and Buch.de.

“The idea [of the Buchpreisbindung] was to eliminate price competition in order to promote the sale of little-known books,” says Simone Thelen, spokeswoman for the Mayersche chain, which was founded in the 19th century and now has 49 stores, mostly in the state of North Rhine Westphalia. “It makes it possible for publishers to publish a variety of books and authors, and it gives us the chance to promote young, unknown authors and books that are not blockbusters.”

This seemingly counter-intuitive strategy – protecting books by keeping them expensive – is actually in line with much of what goes on in Germany today. The country enjoys the healthiest economy in Europe, rising employment, a balanced budget, and an enviable trade surplus not in spite of, but because of, its well-paid workers and their vast network of social services, including universal (that is, mandatory) health care, plus at least four weeks of paid vacation and in some cases more than seven. It makes perfect sense to prosperous, book-loving Germans to pay a fair, strictly regulated price for new books because they believe that the health of the book industry – that is, of publishers, booksellers, and writers, from famous to unknown – is vital to the health of the whole society.

The idea of the government regulating the price of consumer goods is anathema to most Americans, who have bought into free-market gospel and the Walmart mantra that price is everything, and lower is always better than higher. It comes as no surprise, then, that many Americans are wailing about the coming cost of universal health care, our onerous tax rate (among the lowest in the industrialized world), and the need to trim the federal deficit by slashing government spending while preserving tax breaks for the rich. And yet, as the Borders debacle illustrates, allowing booksellers in America to set prices anywhere they choose is no guarantee that even the biggest fish will survive. Pity the vanishing small fry.

Marion Krefting, a sales clerk at Buchladen for the past 13 years, is, like most Germans, widely read, fluent in English, and addicted to foreign travel. Krefting happens to be in love with Australia, which she first visited in the late 1970s and has revisited many times since, most recently two years ago. In Australia she saw first-hand what happens when the government stops regulating the price of books and lets market forces do the job. “The first time I visited Australia, about 35 years ago, they had regulated pricing like we do,” she told me. “When I went back a few years later they had stopped it. What happened was that the bestsellers became cheaper, everything else became more expensive, and there was less variety.” And now the predictable kicker: “The little bookshops don’t exist anymore.”

Australia’s experience is not unique. After price regulation ended in England, the price of books rose by 8 percent; and when it ended in Sweden, one out of four bookstores went out of business. Always willing to go against the grain, the Swiss, who do not now have a book pricing law, are talking about instituting one.

Krefting, the daughter of a bookseller, is a fan of such writers as Tad Williams, Elizabeth George, and William Boyd. But her great love is children’s books, and she points with pride to her personal fief, the large, colorful section devoted to children’s books at the back of Buchladen. When a customer comes in and asks for an appropriate book for a 6-year-old girl, Krefting steers her to a book called Rita das Raubschaf. She gives the customer a concise synopsis of the plot – it’s about a sheep named Rita who gets bored chewing grass and runs off to become a pirate – along with her enthusiastic personal endorsement. The customer buys the book without hesitation. Such crisp professionalism is the norm in German bookstores because clerks are required to study for several years – literature, accounting, and the mechanics of the book business – then pass a standardized exam before they can become certified booksellers. In DIY, blue-sky, go-for-it America, such rigid standards are almost unthinkable. Which is not to say there are no knowledgeable booksellers in the U.S. There are many, of course. It’s just that Americans hope to find knowledgeable employees when they go to a bookstore, while Germans insist on it. To Krefting, the German way makes perfect sense. “This is not a job, it’s a profession I love,” she says. “The pay is not good, the hours are terrible, but I just love books.”

At a nearby shop called Agnes Buchhandlung, the display window contains copies, in German translation, of Gary Shteyngart’sSuper Sad True Love Story, Lorrie Moore’sA Gate at the Stairs, and Salman Rushdie’sLuka and the Fire of Life. The owner, Uli Ormanns, leaves no doubt about the importance of the Buchpreisbindung for small shops like his. “It’s absolutely critical to our survival,” he says. Another thing that helps, he adds, is the national network of book warehouses and its shipping system. “Of the one million books available in Germany, we can order 400,000 of them overnight, just like the big chain stores,” Ormanns says. “Other books, like textbooks, technical books, university presses – which are not a big part of our business – we can get in a week.” He then leads me to the corner of the shop devoted to books – in English – by American and British authors. Particularly popular with Agnes Buchhandlung’s customers are Stephenie Meyer, Philip Roth, Paul Auster, and Jonathan Franzen. “It’s a small part of our business,” Ormanns says, “but more and more customers are asking for American and English authors in English, usually after they’ve read the book in German.”

Catherine Brull, a native of Belgium who has worked in the shop for seven years, is getting ready to crack open her new copy of Super Sad True Love Story, which is priced at 19.95 euros, about $28, including tax. (The sales tax on books in Germany is 7 percent, compared with 19 percent for most consumer goods.) “The German people like the American way of writing,” Brull says. “Sometimes the German authors aren’t easy to read. They have a heavy heritage – Grass, Mann, Boll – and they’re always thinking about that.”

Discounted books are not unheard-of in Germany. When I walked into the venerable Buchhandlung Walther Koenig in the heart of Cologne, I was greeted by a large table festooned with high-quality art books reduced in price by as much as 75 percent. There are four ways sellers can make such sharp price cuts: if the book is used, if it’s damaged, if it was imported from a country without a Buchpreisbindung, or if the sales are so slow after 18 months that the publisher declares it a “remainder,” thus freeing stores to set their own price. The effect of the rule is that large chain stores tend to offer remaindered books at sharp discounts, which smaller stores rarely try to match. Similarly, there are no price rules on audio books, and therefore it’s almost impossible to find them at small shops. The prices of e-books, which currently account for less than 1 percent of all book sales in Germany, are regulated by the Buchpreisbindung.

3.Which brings us, finally, inevitably, to the elephant in the middle of the bookshop. I’m talking of course about the differences in reading habits between Americans and Germans – or, to be a bit more broad, between Americans and most of the rest of the civilized world. Simply put, one of the major reasons Germany has a healthy book publishing industry, beyond its pricing law, is because Germans (like the English, the Irish, the Japanese, the French, and many other nationalities) tend to read more, and more seriously, than Americans. I can’t cite statistics to prove this, but after traveling much of the world I know in my bones that it’s true. I became convinced of it the day I boarded an airplane in Dusseldorf and sat next to a perfectly typical German hausfrau who spent the flight devouring Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, a novel that has defeated me every time I’ve tried to read it. I remember thinking: Germans are different.

“It’s true that the tradition of reading is very deep-rooted in German culture,” says Michael Roesler-Graichen, an editor at the magazine put out by the Borsenverein, the national society of publishers and booksellers based in Frankfurt. “It’s not the whole population. The so-called higher literature, or belles lettres, is read by a small percentage. But it’s a very vital tradition.”

In 2007 an Association of American Publishers (AAP) survey revealed that one in four Americans did not read a single book – not one book – the previous year. Things seem to have improved since hitting that nowhere-to-go-but-up nadir. In 2009 the National Endowment for the Arts reported that the number of Americans reading literature (novels, short stories, poems, and plays) had increased for the first time since 1982. And this summer a joint survey by the AAP and the Book Industry Group revealed that American publishers’ net sales rose by 5.6 percent from 2008 to 2010, thanks to surging sales of e-books as well as juvenile and adult fiction. Much is now being made of the ascendancy of e-books and the boost they’re giving to the American book industry. I say hooray. But I’m inclined to wonder if this ramping-up of e-reader and e-book sales is an indicator that Americans are suddenly reading more. I suspect they’re merely downloading more. I hope I’m wrong. Time will tell.

None of this is to suggest that the German system of selling books could or should be transplanted wholesale to the United States. Nor is it to imply that all Germans are better-read and better-educated than all Americans. Roesler-Graichen, the editor, is happy to set the record straight on that score. “Whenever I visit America, people say, ‘Oh, you Germans are so well educated, you’re so well read,'” he says. Then, with a laugh, he adds, “I have to tell them it’s not true of all Germans.”

He’s right, of course. But there can be no denying that books occupy a special place in the life of Germany, the country that gave us the printed book. Thelen, the spokeswoman for the Mayersche chain, sums that place up nicely. “Books are not just a commodity here,” she says. “They have a cultural value that has to be saved.”